David Hilbert

David Hilbert (23 January 1862-14 February 1943) was a German mathematician who discovered and developed fundamental ideas in many areas, including invariant theory, calculus of variations, commutative algebra, algebraic number theory, the foundations of geometry, the spectral theory of operators, and proof theory.

Biography
David Hilbert was born in Koenigsberg, East Prussia, Prussia in 1862, and he worked as a senior lecturer at the University of Koenigsberg from 1886 to 1895, when he became a mathematics professor at Goettingen. He remained at Goettingen for the rest of his life, and he was surrounded by a circle of some of the most prominent mathematicians of the 20th century. In 1933, he saw the Nazis purge most of the prominent faculty members due to their Jewish descent or their lack of loyalty to Adolf Hitler, and, when Minister of Education Bernhard Rust asked Hilbert if his school's mathematics was suffering after the departure of the Jews, Hilbert said that the department did not exist without them. He died in 1943, and he had a small funeral, as most of his colleagues were in exile due to the Nazi persecution.